


More Like The Emperor

by emperor_bell



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Coffee Shops, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-19 01:32:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10629378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emperor_bell/pseuds/emperor_bell
Summary: Based on the prompt: "you give me a different fake name every time you come into starbucks and I just want to know your real name bc ur cute but here I am scrawling “batman” onto your stupid cappuccino" but Bellamy's a nerd so Roman emperors instead.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I was desperate to have the motivation to write something so I was looking up prompts and spent like 8 hours off and on on this disaster. And I still haven't re-read it all the way through because I can't look at it any longer than necessary. 
> 
> HUGE THANKS to my writing bff @stayingwhelmed for beta-reading this and fixing my hundreds of punctuation mistakes. You rock pal.

Clarke knew she would regret volunteering to work the early shifts when she started working at Starbucks, but it aligned with her class schedule and she was hoping at least the free coffee would do _something_ to wake her up in the morning.

She wasn’t five minutes into her first shift, barely past five-thirty am, so early even the sun couldn’t be bothered to show itself yet, before she knew for certain that her hopes were misplaced. 

She did her best to tame the scowl on her face on the off chance they actually had customers before six. By seven, she could very nearly manage a smile when serving the pre-coffee grumps that dragged themselves through their doors. But before six, or really, if she was honest, six-thirty, people were lucky if she didn’t glare at them like she wanted to splash the hot coffee in their faces. 

Her manager would probably be more bothered by this if most of the customers seemed to care much about the look on her face. She almost didn’t mind serving those people, the ones who were clearly just as amused at being up at such an absurd hour as she was and were just trying to get themselves a halfway decent cup of caffeine to get through their day.

That, she could handle.

What really, really made her want to poison someone’s cappuccino were _morning people._

Part of her already hated him the moment he walks through the door; it was her third shift and she’d only seen two people that morning, verging on five-forty-five, the slight smirk seeming plastered on his face like he existed to charm every person on the planet.

He saunters up to the register and grins at her. She’s just awake enough to register the fact that his smile could literally end wars, ( _or start them,_ she thought, _that would be more historically accurate_ ) but it still did little to brighten her mood.

She takes his order and his voice in every way matches his overwhelmingly attractive exterior. He had it all, really; the dark, curly hair, the dark eyes, the endearingly freckled skin and muscles she was sure made other girls swoon.

Other girls, that is, who were not raging monsters before six am, face to face with a man who seemed determined to radiate _sunshine._ She finds herself just as annoyed by his good looks as she is by his good mood.

She manages to keep herself composed while taking his order, but catches herself only after making a snide comment about _The Fault in Our Stars_ when he says his name is Augustus.

In her moment of horror that she’d just made fun of a customer’s name, sure he’s going to get upset and tell her manager and she’s going to lose her job before she’s even finished her third shift, he has the audacity to _smirk._

“More like the emperor, Clarke,” he says with a pointed glance toward her name tag.

She almost would’ve preferred if he’d gotten her fired; _that,_ at least, would’ve likely prevented her from seeing him again.

As it happened, instead she had the joy of seeing him the next morning.

He comes in wearing a pair of glasses she didn’t remember him having the day before, (she wonders briefly whether or not they’re real. The part of her that hated him for being so cheery in the morning said he _would_ be the type to wear fake glasses, but the rational part said he was probably wearing contacts the day before… so maybe her contemplation about the validity of his glasses wasn’t _quite_ so brief) and he smiles the same bright smile and despite herself, she almost doesn’t mind his presence. In the absence of the sun, maybe his smile wasn’t half-bad.

All of her temporary annoyance reprieve dissipates when he gives her the name for the cup.

She had already started writing the ‘A’ for Augustus when he says it, and her head snaps up.

“ _Tiberius_?” she repeats, incredulous, “I thought it was Augustus, like The Fault in Our Stars?”

“Or the emperor,” he reiterates, before smirking and infuriating her further. “You must have me confused with someone else, Clarke.”

And it’s that _exact same_ pointed look at her name tag that genuinely makes her want to pull the lid off his steaming hot black coffee (seriously, who orders _black coffee at Starbucks?_ ) and pour it over his head. But in an effort to not risk losing her job twice in a row, she manages to calmly hand over his drink with only a well-intentioned glare.

If she wanted to moderately burn him the first two times they met, she was half considering stabbing him in the eye with her sharpie the third time.

“Caligula!?” she half-shouted, earning her a look from her manager.

“No, you’re pronouncing it wrong, it’s _Cal_ igula,” he responded with that _horrible_ ( _beautiful,_ her mind betrayed her) smirk of his. “Nice girls get to call me Cal.”

“Well,” she said, grabbing his coffee, “then it’s a good thing I’m not nice.” She offered her own wink, belatedly realizing when he grinned how flirty her statement sounded, and he took his drink with a smile and walked out.

*

“I _hate_ history,” she groaned for what was probably the tenth time that evening. “Why am I taking European history again?”

“Because it’s required to graduate and you thought it sounded more interesting than learning about American history for the seventeenth time,” Raven reminded her, not looking up from where she was reading on the couch across the room.

They’d been living in their crappy apartment since the start of sophomore year and Raven’s constant realism was still annoying at times. Even more so when Clarke was forced to read about dead people she didn’t care about.

“Well I was wrong,” she moaned, laying on the floor and dropping the textbook dramatically on her chest, to which her roommate rolled her eyes. “Why should I care about Copernicus or Galileo or fricking Caligula.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re not reading much about _Caligula_ in your European history course,”

“No…” Clarke conceded, “but you don’t know they’re not mentioning Roman emperors.”

“Clarke, the Middle Ages didn’t start until _after_ the Roman Empire fell,” Raven said, finally sitting up to look in her direction. “No wonder you suck at history; you suck at it.”

Clarke stuck her tongue out at her smart aleck roommate, like the mature adult she was.

“Are you sure there’s not some other reason you have Roman emperors on the brain?” Raven continued, “Like a certain aggravating customer you can’t seem to stop talking about?”

“Don’t even,” Clarke said with a glare.

Raven shrugged, starting to open her book again, when Clarke continued, “You know, I looked it up and there’s about a _billion_ ways to pronounce Caligula, so who does he think he is correcting me? And ‘nice girls get to call him Cal’, what kind of douchebag thing to say?”

Raven rolled her eyes again, but it was in an endearing way this time. “Are you sure you’re not even a little extra fond of this guy, and that’s why he bothers you so much?”

Clarke scoffed, trying for utterly disgusted. “He _bothers_ me, as you put it, thanks Nicholas Sparks, because he comes into Starbucks before six am and gives me a different Roman emperor’s name every morning and then corrects me when I spell it wrong, like I _obviously_ should know how to spell _Vitellius_ for god’s sake.”

“Whatever you say, Clarke.” 

*

She absolutely does not look forward to him coming.

And she absolutely is not at all fond of him.

And she is definitely not disappointed the first morning she comes in and isn’t greeted early in her shift with his ridiculous smirk.

She’d called in sick the morning before to study for her history test, (which went _fine_ thank you very much, Raven. She was expecting a respectable B-) so she started her morning with the names of European kings and queens instead of Roman emperors. And she preferred it that way. Really.

But when she was at work the next morning, well, she just expected him there, so it was natural to feel like something was missing.

At least, that’s what she told herself when she tried to casually bring it up to Wells, her oldest friend and the only other person crazy enough to volunteer for early shifts, because he was one of those sunny morning people Clarke hated, and just a sunny person in general, which made him impossible to dislike. 

“Hey, do you get any interesting customers during your morning shifts?” She asked, not quite meeting his eyes. They were sprawled out in her apartment one day, half paying attention to the movie playing on the tv.

“What do you mean?” He asked, briefly glancing away from the tv.

“I don’t know…” Wells turns and raises an eyebrow at her and she continues, “Like I mean, there’s this guy that comes in _every_ day and I swear he’s even more perky in the morning than you are. It’s before six am; no one in their right mind should be smiling as bright as he does.”

Wells gives her a knowing look, but doesn’t comment on her describing Mystery Guy’s smile as ‘bright’, “Some people don’t stay up until 2 am watching Brooklyn Nine Nine —“

“It’s a quality show!”

“—and,” Wells continues, ignoring her interruption, “they actually wake up with enough energy to face the day.”

“Sounds fake, but okay.” 

Wells smiles endearingly at her, “So what’s perky dude’s name? Maybe I’ve seen him.”

“Uh,” Clarke stutters, “possibly Augustus? Dark curly hair, tan skin, freckles, always orders black coffee like a crazy person?”

Clarke almost cringes at the way the look on Wells’ face mirrors Raven’s earlier in the week.

“Yeah,” he says, “sounds familiar, although I can’t say he’s ever been overly _perky_ when I’ve seen him; normally he seems about as happy to be there as you do in the morning. He actually scowled at me the last time he came in. And I’m pretty sure his name isn’t Augustus.”

“Oh, I’m sure it isn’t,” she says with an exaggerated roll of her eyes.

*

Clarke can’t get her conversation with Wells out of her head that night; surely Mystery Guy wouldn’t be doing his perky morning thing to brighten her day. She’s sure her agitation is written clear across her face, so in the end, she comes to the conclusion that he’s doing it just to spite her.

And that is something even she can appreciate.

Really, one has to admire his determination.

Her conclusion is what prompts her to close out of her Netflix tab and Google Roman emperors. Sure enough, her suspicions were correct and he was, in fact, choosing the names in chronological order. 

_What a nerd,_ she thought.

 _A cute nerd,_ her traitorous mind countered.

She scrolls down the list to the last name he’d used, Nerva, and writes down the one that comes next.

Smiling to herself, she closes her laptop and actually goes to sleep before midnight that night, and when she wakes up the next morning, she finds herself almost ( _almost_ ) looking forward to his morning coffee run.

Six am comes and goes and she can’t help but wonder whether he’ll come in. He hadn’t been there yesterday; maybe he’d found some other barista girl to torment. And why did that bother her so much? He’d been nothing more than a minor annoyance in her life; she should be glad if he moved on somewhere else.

And yet…

Her train of thought was interrupted when she caught sight of a familiar figure through the windows, walking toward the door. She quickly turned around to start brewing his coffee, before turning back to the register to face him, right as he walked in.

He smiled when he saw her standing there, but it disappeared as soon as it had come, replaced by his usual smirk.

“You know,” he started, “the cafe down the street has way better coffee. You guys should take notes.”

“Oh, is that where you ditched us for yesterday?” She asked, ignoring the way the corners of his mouth twitched.

“I was having breakfast with my sister, but I’m glad you missed me.” He winked at her and she rolled her eyes, picking up the cup now filled with coffee and placing a lid on top.

“I have a black coffee here for Trajan; is that you or did he go to the shop down the street?” 

He grinned, and she told herself she was only paying attention to the way his eyes lit up because she’d put too much effort into this whole thing, and she wanted it to pay off. Not like his smile was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Nope. 

“I see you’ve been doing your research,” he said, wrapping his hand around the coffee cup. And if their hands stayed there a few second longer than necessary, their fingers brushing, she didn’t even notice.

“Maybe,” she shrugs when he pulls his hand away. “You’re a nerd, by the way.”

“Maybe,” he mimics, and he smiles again, soft, in a way she hasn’t seen before. “Thanks, Clarke.”

“You got it, Trajan.”

He opens his mouth like he’s about to say something else, but instead he smiles, turns, and walks out. She thinks maybe that’s when she started thinking of them as friends.

*

She’s still not a fan of mornings (still hates them with a fiery passion), but she begins to look forward to seeing him, even at the ungodly hour which he gets his coffee.

She makes a habit of writing the name on the cup before he gets there, always looking it up again the night before her shift to make sure she gets it right, because she can’t imagine his ridicule if she were to get them out of order.

Some mornings they chat a little, make small talk until another customer walks in or he looks at his watch and rushes off to… wherever he’s going in the mornings.

It startles her sometimes, how little she knows about this man she’s started to see as her friend. She knows he likes history, knows he has a sister because every now and then he skips his morning coffee to get breakfast with her.

( _“The coffee may be better down the street, but I just feel so much more at home here. I tried to tell the barista there that my name was Severus and do you know what she said? ‘Severus Snape?’, as if she didn’t know I was referring to Septimius Severus.”_

__

__

“Well, obviously!”

 _“The nerve.”_ )

She also knows that he doesn’t actually like mornings, as he admitted to her only in the last few times she’d seen him.

( _“I mean, I was in a good mood that first time I came in here, but after that it was just really amusing watching you get all mad at me so I kept it up. You’re like an angry kitten.”_

__

__

_“Oh, screw off.”_ )

But otherwise, she knows next to nothing about him. The small talk is just that: small. And it’s in those small moments, full of lighthearted laughter and witty banter, that she starts to realize maybe what she’s feeling for him isn’t so small.

In reality, a part of her has known it for long enough that it’s not startling when she finally accepts that she likes him as more than just a regular customer, more than just a friend she sees early in the morning a few times a week. That she wants to see him more often than that, to see the way his eyes dance in the sunlight, listen to the way he talks when his voice isn’t still gravelly from sleep, watch the way he interacts with other people. She wants to meet his little sister and go to that little coffee shop with him and force him to sit still while she paints the constellations scattered across his cheeks. She wants to _know_ him and wants him to know her.

And she knows how ridiculous it is to be thinking like this about someone whose relationship with her amounts to him being a Starbucks regular and her going along with his emperor game.

She doesn’t even know his real name.

A fact which is especially frustrating when he stops showing up every morning.

The first time it happens, she thinks nothing of it. _He’s with his sister,_ she thinks, _no big deal._ The second time, she’s confused, but unconcerned. _He’ll explain tomorrow._

When he doesn’t show up the next day, she starts to get uneasy. 

_He’s probably just on vacation or something._

_But why wouldn’t he have told me?_

_Why would he tell you, Clarke? You don’t need to know where he is at all times._

Days stretch into weeks and she’s officially freaking out.

“What if he’s hurt or something and I have no way of knowing?” She asks Raven, verging on frantic, after it’s been sixteen days she hasn’t seen him.

“Why don’t you just try to look him up? If he’s dead it’ll at least be on his Facebook.”

Her blood runs cold at the thought of him being dead, and she shoves the thought out of her head. “I don’t even know his first name, Raven! It’s not as though anything comes up when you Google _“hot history nerd with little sister in the Seattle area””_

“You tried, didn’t you?”

“... No?”

Raven gives her a look.

“Yes, okay, I did,” she admits, “but I’m concerned for his safety, that’s it!”

“Says the girl who just called him hot,” Raven says, entirely unconvinced.

“Objectively!” Clarke protests feebly. There’s really no use denying it; her friends could tell she liked him even before she could.

Her friends.

 _Wells._

“That’s it!” She cries, jumping up from the couch and snatching her phone from the coffee table.

“What’s it?” Raven asks, but Clarke doesn’t answer, tapping Wells’ name on her screen and waiting impatiently for him to pick up.

“Hey Clarke, what’s up?” Wells’ voice comes from the other end of the line.

“Wells! Hey, um, you know the guy we were talking about? Dark hair, freckles, black coffee?”

“Yeah,” Wells answers slowly, “what about him?”

“What’s his name?” Clarke asks, trying and failing to keep her voice level.

“Augustus won’t tell you his real name and you’re stooping to asking me?” Wells chuckles, “That’s low even for you, Clarke.”

“Shut up, Wells, he hasn’t been in for weeks and I’m starting to get worried; would you at least tell me the guy’s first name?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about; he’s been there every day I’ve worked since we talked about it. He’s fine, Clarke. It’s not really my place to tell you his name if he won’t.” And with that, there’s a click as Wells hangs up on her, and Clarke almost drops the phone in disappointment.

“So?” Raven prompts, “What’s Mystery Guy’s name?”

“I—I don’t know,” she says slowly, dropping back to her seat on the couch. “Wells won’t tell me, but he says that he’s been there every time he’s working.” She turns to look at her friend. “Do you think he’s avoiding me?”

“Is there any reason he would be avoiding you?” Raven asks, ever the logical one.

“No, I—I don’t think so. It was fine, we were fine…,” she doesn’t even notice the single, traitorous tear slip down her cheek until Raven sits all the way up to pull her against her side.

“Maybe Augustus likes you just as much as you like him, and now he’s too nervous to be around you.”

“Doubtful,” Clarke murmurs against her friend’s shoulder.

*

Another several days go by before Raven finally convinces Clarke that the best way to solve her, admittedly unorthodox, heartbreak was to drown her sorrows in alcohol.

The two of them are sitting at the bar and Clarke thinks maybe it’s working, maybe she can just have fun tonight, laugh with her friend, get drunk and make out with a stranger, and she’ll be back to normal in the morning. She almost doesn’t even think of the dark-haired stranger she wishes she could be making out with. Almost.

Once she actually thinks she sees him across the room. When the moment passes and there’s no one there, she realizes how pathetic it is, and she drinks a little bit more.

She’s barely verging on tipsy, _definitely_ not had enough to drink to deal with this, when Raven gets up to go to the bathroom and she hears a voice behind her.

But it’s not a voice she wants to hear, not a voice she ever wanted to hear again, and she doesn’t even bother to tame her grimace when she turns around and none other than Finn Collins is smiling at her.

This is truly something that would only happen to her. Just. Her. Luck.

“Aw come on, babe,” Finn says when he takes in the look on her face. “Aren’t you happy to see me?”

“Not especially,” she says with a smile, and his own smile falters. “And I don’t think Raven would be thrilled to see you either; what were you doing, just watching and waiting for one of your ex-girlfriends to leave the bar so you could make a move on the other one? That’s pathetic, Finn.”

It was satisfying, to some extent, to watch the smile fall from his face little by little while she talked. And when she finished, he actually had the nerve to look sad.

“Clarke,” he started, but she’d never know what he was going to say, because this time a different voice came from over her shoulder. Just her luck indeed.

“Babe, are you okay?” Came the voice of her favorite pseudo-emperor.

She turned to smile at him, recognizing his rescue for what it was, “Hey! Yeah, I’m alright, Finn was just leaving.” She turned back to Finn, who looked none too eager to do that.

“Clarke, who is this?” He asked, either not getting the hint or just trying to be a jerk. Hard to tell with Finn.

Her smile didn’t falter, glancing behind her only briefly before answering, “This is Augustus, my boyfriend.”

“Augustus?” Finn mocked, his face twisting, “Like The Fault in Our Stars?”

“More like the emperor,” they answer in unison, and Clarke’s grin widens.

Finn turns to walk away with a disgusted look on his face, and Clarke spins around to finally face her rescuer.

“Hey,” he says, smile soft. “Listen, I’m sorry I haven’t been around. There was a family crisis and I was MIA for a few days and I knew that when I came back in you’d ask and I knew I’d tell you but I didn’t want it to be weird because I know we’re not really _friends_ but I felt like I could trust you and I didn’t want to overstep anything and—”

“Woah, slow your roll, Caesar,” she interrupts him, and he falls silent—only for a moment, but when he speaks again, it’s quiet and slow.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and her heart aches.

“How about we start from the beginning, and we can work our way up from there,” she says, and extends a hand toward him. “Hi, I’m Clarke Griffin.”

He takes her hand and smiles in a way that lights up the night. “Bellamy Blake.”

She smiles brighter than she has in weeks, and thinks this just might be the beginning of something beautiful, something she never saw coming all those months ago, a chance meeting at an ungodly hour.

She’ll never be a morning person, but she thinks maybe she won’t mind them as long as she gets to keep spending them with him.

And she does end up making out with a (near) stranger in the bar that night, but she’s not back to normal in the morning. Not even close. 

**Author's Note:**

> the only reason those last 3 paragraphs exist is because I wanted this to be over 4k. Oops.


End file.
